


Mycroft's Schooldays

by redfiona



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mycroft Holmes & Sherlock Holmes - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28428612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redfiona/pseuds/redfiona
Summary: The teachers at their school have long got used to Sherlock accidentally making other boys cry.  When he does it deliberately, that's when they start to worry.  Mycroft, once again, finds himself having to manage Sherlock's messes.
Kudos: 3





	Mycroft's Schooldays

**Author's Note:**

> I started to write this probably shortly after season 2, so some of the details have been thoroughly jossed. The name of some of the characters were generated at using a name generator, and are not intended to reflect on anyone with those names in real life.

Mycroft had hoped to be challenged when he was sent to school. His mother was a genius, but she had no time to teach him about everything. His parents did as much as they could, they researched all the best schools, discounted the obvious ones when it became apparent that their curriculums were not good enough and settled, finally, on this place.

Sadly, he remained unchallenged. It wasn't that the teachers weren't trying, it was merely that Mycroft was very, very good at retaining, recollecting and reorganising information so that it made sense both to him and to anyone else reading his work. He paid enough attention to pass exams, and pass well, and even more effort to making sure he passed as just another pupil, because no-one likes a show-off. The teachers know he's clever, and so do the rest of the schoolboys, but they think he works hard, which he does, if not necessarily on his schoolwork. He's discovered that no-one actually hates the people that have to work hard, they hate the people who want to answer every question and they hate the people that pretend they do no work but do and then get high marks.

He is exceptional, but doesn't rub anyone's nose in it, and is made head boy with very little effort on his part. He needs that otherwise entirely pointless bauble of a title for the future. He's still not chosen what he will do in life, but he thinks government work might be best, because there must be a way to run the government more efficiently.

He spends most of his time analysing how his fellow pupils interact, and how he can manipulate them into doing what he wants. That knowledge is probably more useful than the qualifications he gets, because he could easily have taught himself the GCSE syllabuses at home.

He wishes Sherlock would apply himself to the same lesson.

Mycroft has always known he is cleverer than his brother. Originally, he’d put it down to age difference but now he sees that that was incorrect. It is only a small difference in comparison with everyone else, but it’s there nonetheless. He worries, therefore, that he is partly responsible for Sherlock’s incessant acting out. Sherlock has this need to prove that he is the cleverest person in a room because at home, he isn’t. Mycroft wondered if telling Sherlock that he was their mother’s favourite would help at all. Sherlock wouldn’t believe him, but it’s true.

Mycroft has to do something. Sherlock is in grave danger of being put on report, and that won’t do for the brother of the head boy. Mycroft has no doubt that whichever boy Sherlock reduced to tears deserved it, but he has to get it through to Sherlock that he can’t just do that to other people. Not when it’s obvious that he’s the one that’s doing it at least, and not in a situation where he will be punished for it.

He finds Sherlock in the school library, which is not where he's supposed to be, but at least is somewhere where he'll come to no harm. Mycroft convinces the librarian to leave with nothing more than a cough.

The sound is also enough to catch Sherlock's attention, even if he is pretending not to have noticed. Mycroft sits down opposite Sherlock, who continues to ignore him. Mycroft doesn't have the time to wait for Sherlock to give up this fit of childishness, he has double French in an hour. It's not like at home, where he can wait out Sherlock's obstreperousness, and has, where father was willing to bring him tea while Mycroft waited for the twelve hours it took Sherlock to break.

"There are certain social niceties," Mycroft began.

"Spare me the lecture, Mycroft, I've had it from the Housemaster and Mr. Jenkins already."

Mycroft looks at his brother to see which threads to tug to get him to behave. There is no point appealing to Sherlock's morals, he doesn't have any, or not the ones people are expected to have, and other people, other people who are better at that sort of thing than Mycroft is, have already tried. There is no point trying to shame Sherlock, see previous. Sherlock doesn't care what the people at the school think of him, and Mycroft is saving the threat of Mummy for an emergency. If it hadn't reflected badly on Mycroft, he would have regarded Sherlock as an interesting example of someone with very few external levers that could be manipulated. Sherlock was so almost entirely sealed-off. But Donne had hit on an essential truth, however accidentally, no man was an island. There must be a way of getting through to Sherlock.

Physical threats wouldn't work either, even if Mycroft had considered them a possibility. Mycroft has a cadre of rugby players who owe him a favour, but this is not the time to use them, and it would leave too easy a trail to follow back to Mycroft.

Vanity might be the only way. Not the usual sense of the word, Sherlock wasn't vain like that, although he had inherited their father's innate sense of style - it was a style Mycroft aped because, while he didn't have it, or not as much, he understood the value of appearances. No, Sherlock was vain about his intellect, his ego, the thing that made him act out to prove his intelligence. That would be the way to do it.

"I wasn't going to ask you to respect those social niceties." It was true. Mycroft had stopped *asking* Sherlock to respect them after the incident of the frog. "I was merely confirming that you knew they existed." That got an eyeroll in response. Sherlock really was the most stereotypical teenager sometimes.

Mycroft carries on. "If you didn't know they existed, it would explain your behaviour. I mean, making it so obvious that you were responsible for making one of your classmates cry." That had been the problem. The school and its masters were inured to Sherlock accidentally making boys cry. Sometimes Sherlock was so carried away with his ability to deduce that he didn't stop to think what his deductions meant - the terrible example of Sherlock reducing Flysmith minor to tears when he'd deduced first that his parents were getting divorced and secondly exactly what Flysmith minor had seen his father doing with the nanny (there being a Flysmith minimus and a daughter much younger than the boys at school) springing vividly to mind. But this time, Sherlock had done it deliberately.

Mycroft has no doubt the boy deserved it. Whatever other flaws his brother had; Sherlock was not deliberately cruel for no reason. He didn't have that capability. If Sherlock had been that sort of boy, Mycroft would have been more worried. As it was, it wasn't the doing it, because it wasn’t part of a pattern, it was the getting caught that was the problem. "If you were competent, you wouldn't have been caught."

That works to get Sherlock's attention, Mycroft receives a poisonous glare in return. "As though you could have done better."

"I have." It was true.

Sherlock leans forward in his chair, looking Mycroft over to try and see if he was telling the truth. "When?"

"Work it out." He doesn't want to make it too easy for Sherlock, maybe this would distract him from the trouble he insisted on getting himself into. And, when Sherlock inevitably did work it out, he'd realise Mycroft had had to do it for him, one of the boys in Mycroft's form deciding that the quickest way to hurt Mycroft was to hurt Sherlock. That might get him to behave – the idea that he needed Mycroft’s protection might force his ego to accept that proper behaviour was required.

Mycroft can see Sherlock's brain work as it tries to assess him, to read from Mycroft any similar situation that Mycroft had found himself in. Mycroft had taught Sherlock the theory, when Sherlock was eight and Mycroft was bored. It may have been a mistake. Sherlock wasn't as good at this as Mycroft, he was too easily distracted by minutiae, but it gave him an advantage in social situations, and might keep him out of trouble once he learnt to control the skill.

"David Whiteford, the drugs weren't his ..." Sherlock reconsiders and corrects himself, "no, they were his, he was confused because he is a lot better at hiding them and they were moved somewhere obvious just in time for the inspection." Sherlock's second deduction was correct. While it wasn't that Mycroft didn't know where he could get cannabis from, buying any for that purpose would have left him exposed to possible blackmail. "But why?"

There are things that Mycroft knows Sherlock lacks, not feelings, he has those, but he's aware that the way Sherlock handles emotional inputs is not quite how other people do. Mycroft is also aware that no-one would describe his emotional affect as normal, but he is even more aware that Sherlock's abnormal responses are different to his own. Mycroft has studied, hard, applied all his intellect to the question, and he still wasn't sure exactly what the difference was, only the ways in which it made Sherlock's life harder, and would keep making it harder even after they left school. So Mycroft knows the reason that Sherlock hasn't made the last, intuitive leap, to why Mycroft did all this is because he doesn't know how to. He's not yet capable of accounting for the personal equation. Mycroft isn't sure if that can be taught. Maybe if he could, it would help Sherlock cope with other people better. But maybe it would only make him worse.

"Deduce, brother mine, deduce."

Mycroft can almost see Sherlock making connections between incidents, filling in the gaps with events he hadn't witnessed but he can calculate must have happened. "You have something Whiteford wanted. Not sure if it's power in general or a badge that says 'head boy'. What a stupid thing to fight over." Not if you wanted to develop the right sort of contacts, but Sherlock wasn't interested in the right sort of contacts. "You wouldn't give him what he wanted. So he tried to attack you." And would have done so physically if it hadn't been for a most congenial agreement Mycroft had with the captain of the rugby team - mathematical tutoring in return for generalised protection. What Whiteford didn't understand was that, even as head boy, he wouldn't get the power over people he wanted, because he didn't have the skills to wield the power. There was a strong chance Hammond, captain of the rugby team, would have been happy to back Mycroft against Whiteford even without the recompense of help with partial equations.

Sherlock was continuing to reason his way along events. "Hammond makes sure Whiteford couldn't hit you, and there's no point attacking your academic virtues." Even if Whiteford had the means, arranging a plagiarism scandal wasn't the sort of tactic he would think to employ. "There's nothing else to you, there's nothing else to people, than their bodies and their brains. But all of that started long before the drugs incident, so there must have been a definite event that made you do it." Sherlock was still working towards the point. "The boy, the one who said I'd been bullying him. He's on the football team for my year. And if that was what upset you, Whiteford must have put him up to it." Sherlock was so close to it. "You got Whiteford caught so Evans would stop getting me in trouble. Because me being in trouble would have made you look bad." Sherlock had missed the other reason.

Sherlock was capable enough to see something in Mycroft's expression to make him realise he hasn't captured every point. "Something else, something else." Sherlock was running through the series of possible consequences. "Well, of course Mummy would be upset, but why would that upset you?"

Mycroft has beaten his head against this wall before, but the attempt is worth it this time, as on all other occasions. Sherlock wasn't dense, if understanding didn't come naturally to him, he could learn. "Things that upset Mummy upset me, because seeing her upset makes me upset. I don't want to see Mummy upset." It isn't all of it, it doesn't cover that he wants Sherlock to have the space to grow into something better, and Mycroft thought school was vital to that, but it covers the heart of it in a way Mycroft hopes is intelligible to Sherlock. Yes, Mycroft has had to bring their mother into it, which he's sought to avoid, but she is not there as a threat. That he really is saving. Mycroft is also aware that now is when he needs to hammer his point home. "If you were as clever as you think you are, I wouldn't need to prevent the Housemaster from reporting all of this to Mummy."

"I am as clever as I think I am."

"Then don't make me have this conversation with you again." Sherlock's eyes flash, with that rage that isn't a part of Mycroft's mental make-up at all. Sherlock is swearing to whatever it is that Sherlock swears to, that he'll never be in this position again, exposed to Mycroft's condescension, vulnerable to criticism. Mycroft wishes there was another way to make Sherlock behave, but he hasn't found one, not one he could hope to effect before double French, not one that would begin to work before the Headmaster was likely to make his report to their parents. It was Monday, there was a faint possibility that if Sherlock's behaviour improved before Friday, the Headmaster might say nothing.

Mycroft's timing is perfect, the bell goes for the next lesson, so he can leave the library without being drawn into any argument Sherlock is thinking of making.

Of course, Mycroft's mind isn't quite on French for the next two hours, but enough of it is that there is no evidence in the lesson of any turmoil that might be affecting him. He hopes he has got through to Sherlock, and fears that he hasn't. Sherlock didn't have chance to say anything about not wanting Mycroft's protection, which was true, or about not needing Mycroft to protect him, which wasn't true, whatever Sherlock thought, but Mycroft won't always be there to protect him, and he needs Sherlock to learn enough that Mycroft's protection isn't as necessary as it is now.

**Author's Note:**

> Mycroft remains frustrated that Sherlock never learns to control the skill.


End file.
